Fred Savage's New Wonder Years

How the former child star ended up directing the likes of It's Always Sunny and Party Down, and helped build the landscape of modern comedy

My dad and I never spoke of Fred Savage. It was always Kevin, as in Kevin Arnold, protagonist of The Wonder Years. Throughout the late ’80s, I’d often spend Wednesday nights sitting way too close to our living room’s kerosene heater, the heat scorching my back, as the screen glowed with stories of Kevin, Paul, and Winnie trying to navigate the ’60s and make their way through adolescence. Just like I was, just like my father did 20 years earlier. At the time, it was the only show we truly bonded over, and I marveled at how he marveled at it. Conversations around the dinner table dissolved into discussions about the show’s treatment of Vietnam. Family gatherings involved him asking whoever would listen if they’d seen the latest episode, postulating theories about who Winnie would end up with. Even if they hadn’t, he knew I had, and could count on me to delight in a few inside jokes.

Technically, you could say The Wonder Years was a "period" show, but no one ever talked it in those terms. The first scenes of the pilot make it clear that yes, this show was set in a turbulent time in American history: flashes of bombs going off, Nixon, protest marches, Martin Luther King Jr., and so on dart across the screen in the first few seconds. Narrator Daniel Stern’s voiceover immediately comes in and says, "1968. I was 12 years old. A lot happened that year. Denny McLain won thirty-one games. The Mod Squad hit the air. And I graduated from Hillcrest Elementary, and entered junior high school." The images tell you that times are changing, daily, but the voice brings you right into the mindset of a twelve-year-old boy. The biggest worries for a kid growing up in the ’burbs (which are mentioned within the first few minutes) were girls, understanding sex, not understanding older brothers, grumbling fathers, and protective mothers. While I loved Diff’rent Strokes, The Facts of Life, Silver Spoons, and even watched my fair share of Growing Pains, which were all set in the modern era, The Wonder Years was a coming-of-age story in ways TV had never done before.

Recently, though, I’ve been thinking about Fred Savage. His name is everywhere, suddenly. He keeps popping up as a director in all the television shows I love: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Modern Family, Happy Endings, the late and lamented Party Down. In a fit of nostalgia, I’ve started thinking about those times in front of the TV, those conversations with my dad. I wondered if I was alone.

"Do you ever have people come up and tell you that they related to their father or son through that show?" I ask Savage.

"Yeah, was that you?"

"How’d you know?"

"Oh, I didn’t know. It’s just the way you phrased it."

Savage was born in Chicago in 1976, the son of a real estate agent and a consultant. He got his big break at an audition at a local community center, where he was scouted for commercials and Sears catalogs. He was the kid in those sweaters—you know the one, posed all ’80s-like, with an article of clothing thrown over one shoulder, hooked on the pointer finger.

"The quintessential catalog pose," he describes it. "That’s how I knew I was a pro."

He got his first on-screen break filming a commercial for Pac-Man Vitamins. He doesn’t have much screen time, but at the end he delivers a cute yet important line aimed directly at the makers of ber-popular Flintstones Vitamins: "Goodbye Fred, Hello Pac-Man." Work came steady: an educational film called Dinosaurs!, an episode of the Twilight Zone reboot, a show called Morningstar/Eveningstar which lead to his first real film role, 1986’s The Boy Who Could Fly. It was a role as the sick boy who’s read to by his grandfather in the cult classic The Princess Bride that’s made a lasting impression—but as he explains it, a film with Judge Reinhold called Vice Versa is what got him noticed by those casting The Wonder Years. After landing the lead as Kevin Arnold, he relocated with his family to Los Angeles and committed himself to working throughout his early teens, through his junior year of high school. During his time on The Wonder Years, he received two Emmy nominations and two Golden Globe nominations, as well as universal love from pretty much everyone who watched the show. But when the show ended, things changed. There was no drug problem, no habitual late-night partying on the Hollywood scene, no ’90s raver phase. Instead, he more or less left acting to finish his senior year. School dances were attended. He joined the football team (third string, but still). He acted in his high school musical. And he did well, too—after high school, he attended Stanford. It was there that he committed himself to becoming a director—by becoming an English major.

"Ultimately, a director is a storyteller," Savage says. "I wanted to fortify that part of my life as a director, so I thought the best way to do that is to study and learn about the greatest stories ever written."

When Savage talks, his speech is quick and confident, but there’s something young at heart in this tone. It’s Kevin-esque.

Early in his tenure at Stanford, Savage attended a summer session at USC where he made a sixteen-millimeter film that could be considered his first stab at directing something. It was called Go Fish, a short film about a high-stakes card game.

"It turns out to be a game of Go Fish," he says. "That was my big reveal at the end."

As he finished his time at Stanford, the acting bug was all but gone. He scored a gig on a short-lived NBC comedy called Working, which lasted thirty-five episodes before cancelation. It was there he got his first stab at directing actual people on an actual TV show that the larger public would see.

He did time working on his little brother Ben’s sitcom, Boy Meets World, but his first big job came on a Disney Channel show called Even Stevens, which starred a young Shia LaBeouf. He didn’t stop at just one Disney Channel show. Next came That’s So Raven. Then Hannah Montana. Zoey 101. We could go on.

Savage isn’t embarrassed about his time on the Mickey Mouse network. One thing he makes clear: Work is work, and you take whatever you can get.

"When I first started, I really loved single-camera, half-hour comedy," he says. "At the time, this was before shows like Malcolm in the Middle and Scrubs ushered in this new era of single-camera comedy. Disney and Nickelodeon were doing it. Creatively, I really responded to that form. I felt a connection with young actors, I work with them very well. That was my film school. I became one of their go-to guys. There was a lot of content, a lot of opportunities. If you could do it on schedule, on budget, and churn out something pretty good, they liked you. I could try some things, make some mistakes, and know that I could come back the next week. I loved it there."

Savage’s name reentered my consciousness when I discovered It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, FX’s hilarious sitcom about four young bar owners in Philly who have no regard for morality, loyalty, or social norms. Savage spent three years on the show, from 2007 to 2009.

"When we hired Fred, we had only used two people before," says Charlie Day, one of Sunny’s writers and stars. "We met a lot [of directors]. But when Fred came in, there’s something about his personality. He has this infectious personality. He felt like one of our peers and understood our comedy and the show we were trying to make. At the time, you couldn’t say It’s Always Sunny is like this or that; it was pretty much its own thing. It felt like he found the same things amusing and had the right energy to be captain of the ship."

Savage credits Sunny for his transition into adult comedy.

"That was really the line of demarcation, where you’re definitely not in children’s television anymore," Savage says. "I got to do edgier, darker stuff. I’m not sure why, but I think it was because [creator/writer/star] Rob McElhenney was a huge Wonder Years fan. I don’t know how I ended up on that show. I was a huge fan of it, they were meeting directors, and I think it was because he could ask me questions about The Wonder Years."

Savage directed episodes in seasons 3, 4 and 5—classics with blunt titles like "Who Pooped the Bed?", "Dennis Reynolds: An Erotic Life," "Frank Sets Sweet Dee on Fire," and "The Aluminum Monster vs. Fatty McGoo." It remains his longest string of shows of any one series to date.

"Sunny is a major collaboration and he was always open to that," Day says. "Always open to discussing the options and arguing his opinions, which we welcomed—the motivation behind it was to make the best show possible."

I imagined some of those arguments could involve the proper use of crack, or how to make fun of a homeless person.

"Right," Day laughs. "Should the crack be in the left hand or the right hand?"

Working with Day, McElhenney, Danny DeVito, Glenn Howerton, and Kaitlin Olson exposed Savage to a new comedic landscape and how to stage jokes—but it was also a crash course in production and how to work on a constrained budget. Now he knows how to stretch a dollar, in a time when networks and studios are trying to spend as little as possible but get back huge returns. With Sunny, the aesthetics of the show have a low-budget feel, but that’s due to a creative choice that would probably exist even if the Sunny gang had all the money in the world.

"Oddly enough, we found certain angles or camera moves intrusive to the story," Day says. "A lot of it has to do with dialogue and that it feels improvisational with its look. With this, it was truly about...almost capturing people if they were real people. The camera—you’re really not thinking about it."

"The visual style on Sunny, it was all handheld cameras," Savage explains. "We didn’t want anything cinematic about it. It was always just tell the story. And it was a real ercise for me as a director, because usually you use the camera to tell the story—to accentuate things. You can still do that, but the challenge for me was, how do you tell the story in other ways? They kind of took the camera away from you. You had to find ways to express yourself as a director and as a storyteller in other ways. It was a real ercise. Ultimately, a really valuable one. On my kids’ stuff, you’re competing with Spongebob. Everything has to be visual! And broad! And in your face! On Sunny, because the material was so in your face, it was an ercise in restraint."

What made Kevin Arnold such a great television character was the fact that he was so not a television character. In many ways, I was him, and chances are those who grew up in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, or whenever know a Kevin Arnold themselves. He’s an everyday guy who wants to do the right thing, stand up for what’s right, put the jacket around the girl when it’s cold outside—but he’s not a jock, not a tough guy or a greaser or a stoner. He’s just...Kevin.

I asked him if his path into directing and more specifically adult comedies like Sunny and Party Down was because of a desire to shed that Kevin persona that must have followed him after The Wonder Years ended. After all, it’s no secret that child stars look to distance themselves from the constricting view the larger population has of them.

"The persona of The Wonder Years is something that’s going to be with me forever," he says matter-of-factly. "And I’m happy for that. It’s nothing that I’d ever shy away from, and it makes me feel so good that it’s something people still remember and talk about it and think of it so fondly. I think now I’ve established myself as a director, but starting out, I’d be foolish to think that every opportunity that came after The Wonder Years didn’t stem from The Wonder Years. So I owe so much of everything for that show. The move into adult comedy wasn’t so much moving away from The Wonder Years, as expanding myself as a director."

As he says this, I think about how we’ve somehow come full circle; I once related with him through his TV self and now, decades later, was conversing with him about that self and how it plays a role in his modern work. When it came down to it, Kevin Arnold and I didn’t have too much to stress over back then. Savage, on the other hand, has been working for the majority of his life. The childhood he portrayed on screen was a job. And he’s still insanely enthusiastic, humbly so, about continuing to work in television. Like Pac-Man vitamins themselves, he seems to know it could all go away tomorrow, just like that.

"The biggest argument we got in with Fred was about one of my favorite episodes, the Porn Awards Party [of Party Down]," says Rob Thomas, creator of Veronica Mars and Party Down. "In television, the directors submit a cut and the ecutive producers get the final cut, and he was so upset because we showed more of Ron’s [Ken Marino] penis than he wanted. He felt, and I would disagree with this, that Ron’s prosthetic dick looks fake. Fred got a sliver and just barely had a cut of Ron zipping it up. It’s not like we had a long cut of it, but we did leave in enough that we saw the 10 solid inches. Fred was so upset and thought it was overkill on the joke. I understand—it’s one of those moments where it’s, ’What do people think is funny?’ A few episodes later, he turned in the episode of Ron’s high school reunion and the funny thing about it was the buckets of vomit. They kept coming out of Ron and the funny thing is, a half a second of dick is too much—but six gallons of vomit... It’s one of my favorite directing choices."

Savage was chosen as one of two directors to helm Party Down throughout its two seasons. He got the gig, Thomas says, because of his work on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and, as the dick/vomit story implies, he thinks hard about the unlikely (and sometimes unseemly) edges of comedy. And while the show wasn’t as highly rated as fans hoped, Party Down did throw the careers of Adam Scott and Lizzy Caplan into high gear, while tapping comedic vets Jane Lynch and Ken Marino.

"Everyone got a little luster coming off the show," Thomas says about the Party Down afterlife. "L.A. was watching. Even though we didn’t have a high viewership, when we’d go into meetings, Party Down is what people would want to talk about."

Savage’s understanding of comedy does, in fact, get pretty deep. In asking him broadly what he finds funny, he stammers a bit and sighs, as if to say, "You got several hours?"

"Okay, then what’s funny about Sunny that’s different than what’s funny about Party Down?" That gets him going.

"Always Sunny is much more absurdist," he responds immediately. "There’s a lot of fun in watching people do or say things that you could never imagine yourself doing. There’s a lot of laugh of fantasy, where they take something that’s real and pump it up to insane levels. For example, the "Who Pooped the Bed?" episode, we’ve all had accidents as kids, maybe as adolescents, maybe even as adults you have accidents in the bed. But to take it to the next level, and handle this piece of shit, and take it to a forensics scientist and make it this whodunit around this piece of poop—it takes something relatable and makes it kind of absurd."

As I visualized crap being analyzed, he quickly moves into the darker territories of his work, without skipping a beat.

"With Party Down, the comedy comes from a painful place. That catering company is purgatory. That’s something as an audience we really relate to, and it makes you question your life, your choices that led you there, and how you can get out of it. To see a show feeling that same pain and humiliation, that’s where the comedy comes from. Laughing at your own pain—that’s a keystone to comedy."

I start to think about how his work and the things he’s interested in, again, mirror a lot of what people his same age are going through just like they did back in the ’80s and early ’90s. Only this time, he’s finding characters and stories to tell that are relatable, either through fantasies of analyzing each other’s shit (metaphorically, or otherwise) or the dread that comes with waking up and realizing days and years have passed and, like a lot of people, there’s not much to show. Pretty universal feelings these days.

The shows he’s been hired for since Party Down are seeking that same odd verve. His latest is back with NBC, a half-hour sitcom called Best Friends Forever, which was created by and stars Upright Citizens Brigade alums Lennon Parham and Jessica St. Clair. Savage was hired to direct the initial six-episode run as well as ecutive produce. [Editor’s note: NBC has since quietly removed the show from its lineup—another midseason fatality that has sparked some minor protests about the decision to pull it.]

"They gave us a fifth of what a normal pilot is given, and we took that money and hired Fred Savage," St. Clair says. "Without Fred, our show would never have gotten picked up. He made it look like three million dollars. He said ’There’s no way we can turn in two scenes and have NBC pick us up. If we’re going to compete with these three million dollar pilots, we’re going to have to look as good, if not better."

St. Clair is right. It does look better. But what St. Clair’s anecdote really reveals is that people are banking on him now, depending on him to make them look good.

I still don’t know if The Wonder Years was that seminal show that kids and their parents bonded over. Charlie Day doesn’t remember who he watched it with. "I can hardly remember what I had for breakfast," he tells me. Rob Thomas was already in college by the time The Wonder Years hit the air; the show that took him down memory lane was Freaks and Geeks. But maybe I can just leave it at that and know that instead of kids bonding through his work when he was a kid, we’re all relating to each other by laughing with Savage at the adults we’ve become.

"I’m interested in questions of identity, people figuring out who they are, who they want to be," he says. "I really love the idea of self-examination and in comedy there’s a rich history that comes from that." Especially when there’s vomit, dick jokes, and a bunch of assholes involved.

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